A necessary change

Dear Faculty,

Once again, it is an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the start of another academic year. It goes without saying that the success of the Schulich Medicine & Dentistry - Windsor Campus is completely dependent on your tireless contributions.

As we look ahead, we are now one year away from the onset of our competency-based curriculum renewal. I have been asked by many of you the rationale for this change.

Is it necessary? What problems will it solve? How will we know if we are accomplishing our mandate given that we ourselves did not train in this framework?

These are all valid questions.

This change is certainly necessary. We know from multiple studies of adverse events that there are individual and system limitations that negatively affect patient outcomes. Time-based curricula with a focus on summative assessments fail to address the recognition that some of our learners are left behind, while others are not coached to their fullest extent. Our education model must be based on the health needs of the population, and our patients’ expectation that we take every possible avenue to creating the best possible doctors.

While certainly this will pose logistical challenges, so too will it give opportunity. We, as a distributed campus, have a wonderful opportunity to study the implementation of this truly global change in how we teach tomorrow’s doctors. I urge any of you with interest in this to contact me.

I recognize the frustration some of you feel when you assess your current workload and the ongoing 'asks' for your time. I would be more than happy to meet with you individually, or departmentally, to discuss these curricular changes, but more importantly, how we as a School can support you.

Additionally, I wanted to share that this year, you will begin to receive more regular communication on the School’s overall change to competency based medical education, providing more news, interesting interviews about ongoing research, resources, helpful advice and much more. You can expect to see the first issue of this newsletter in late October.